sep=“;” statement breaks utf8 BOM in CSV file which is generated by XSL

Question

I\'m currently developing CSV export with XSLT. And CSV file will be used %99 percent with Excel in my case, so I have to consider Excel behavior.

My first problem

Answer 1

This is the result of my testing with Excel 2013.

If you're stuck with UTF-8, there is a workaround which consists of BOM + data + sep=;

Input (written with UTF8 encoding)

\ufeffSome;Header;Columns
Wîth;Fàncÿ;Stûff
sep=;

Output

|Some|Header|Columns|
|Wîth|Fàncÿ |Stûff  |
|sep=|      |       |

The issue with solution is that while Excel interprets sep=; properly, it displays sep= (yes, it swallows the ;) in the first column of the last row.

However, if you can write the file as UTF16-LE, then there is an actual solution. Use the \t delimiter without specifying sep and Excel will play ball.

Input (written with UTF16-LE encoding)

\ufeffSome;Header;Columns
Wîth;Fàncÿ;Stûff

Output

|Some|Header|Columns|
|Wîth|Fàncÿ |Stûff  |